November 29 Monday – Sam’s notebook entry (for Dec. 1):
Night before last [Nov. 29] Madame Letschtishki [sic] came & took Clara & me to Ritter von Dutschka’s to dine. Twenty persons at dinner: Count von Eulenberg (German Ambassador) & others came in after dinner. A remarkable gathering—no commonplace people present, no featherheads. Princes & other titled people there, but not because of their titles, but for their distinction in achievement. It was like a salon of old-time Paris. Madame Dutschka is large & stately & beautiful; cordial, & full of all kinds of charm of manner, ways & speech. She is Russian; appears to be about 30, but is really 52, & has a son 28. Count Kilmansegge, Governor of Upper Austria & wife, and—but I cannot remember the names. The new baritone from Beyreuth (von Rooy) sang—a wonderful voice. He is but 26 & has a future before him.
A countess there, whom I took to be a girl of 18; she has a daughter who is 13.
Dinners there 3 times a week [NB 42 TS 49].
Dolmetsch writes of the other important people Sam and Clara met at this party:
Among the guests he met “a young countess there, whom I took to be a girl of 18; she has a daughter who is 13.” This was the Countess Wydenbruck-Esterházy , who soon became the Clemens family’s cicerone in Viennese society and their closest friend outside musical and literary circles. Her influence on what happened to them in Austria and upon Clara’s musical plans was almost as great as that of Leschetizky himself.
Despite Clemens’s impression of her as girlish, this thirty-eight-year-old widow was one of the reigning grandes dames of Vienna’s social and cultural life. She was indeed strikingly pretty and graceful, as well as myopic, according to her niece, the British actress Nora Wydenbruck, who thought “her short-sightedness added to her charm” since, like most ladies of fashion then, she disdained eyeglasses. Her social status was owed in no small degree to having been born an Esterházy, among the richest, most powerful families of the Austro-Hungarian nobility [133-4]. (Editorial emphasis.)
F. Kaplan writes:
“Twain soon began attending the Esterhayzy-Metternich salon, an elite stage for charity performances and reputation-making, where he met [Gustav] Mahler, August Strindberg, Erich Korngold, and Bruno Walter” [558]. Note: the Countess was a patron of these and other leading musicians.
“A Riot in the Vienna Parliament” by Mark Twain ran in the New York World [Camfield, bibliog.].